Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.

Download from here. There's also a cool video on YouTube that shows Sophie in action.

actually, I've found out about it from your blog.
I should have given you credit... sorry.

I've read your review...
yeah for the first blick it looks like a pimped up HTML editor... but I think there's much more to it.
I haven't played around with it yet but looks like it will be a great tool for collaborative learning e.g. sharing notes and highlights.
By exposing this alpha release the team can get the necessary buzz and it will hopefully boost the product.
It's very early version though... (as they also wrote)
a list of planned features would be nice.

Now I get it... sort of. I qualify that because it sounds like the creators are still on the fence about what they've created! Looks like it's an "average joe" app for creating e-books, including web-like features... like porting Quark or InDesign into the e-book world. And I see it's very much in a beta stage here, so I'll make no criticisms about the interface, the tools, etc.

One thing I wonder is what e-book formats this tool will be kicking out. Is it designed to convert e-books to various and sundry of the existing formats, or for specific devices? Or is it ultimately intended to create documents specifically for the Sophie Reader? How much is it "based on XML," and can that XML output be converted easily to other formats? I'd hate to think this potentially good idea might add to our "Tower of e-Babel."

My understanding is that they use XML as a binder, something like the Opendocusment format and IDPDF (whatever) guys are doing with their "glorified zip" files, but way better.
They use XML not just to bind the content together but also to build a book like document with format and structure and timeline -- for multimedia content synchronization.
From what I've seen so far looks like they'll support HTML and RTF at least and of course plain text.
Yes, looks like you'll need the Sophie Reader to read the documents. Remember it's FOSS, so I don't see it as a problem.
Would be nice to see it working on an eInk device some day.